The Onimusha name spent two decades gathering dust in Capcom’s vault. Then Onimusha: Way of the Sword shipped, and the climb started right away.
Friday’s debut put it at No. 6 on Steam. SteamDB logged 40,000 concurrent players on day one — a respectable figure for a game sharing a launch week with The Blood of Dawnwalker.
Then came the weekend.
From sixth to first in a single day
A day after release, Way of the Sword sat at No. 1 on Steam’s best-seller chart, above Halloween: The Game and WARDOGS alike. SteamDB counted 74,575 active players by Saturday — close to twice the launch-day number after a single flip of the calendar.
Its setting is a reimagined Edo-period Kyoto, and it marks Capcom’s first mainline series installment since Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams back in 2006. Anyone who played that entry on a PlayStation 2 has been waiting since George W. Bush’s second term.
The critics are mostly on board, with one recurring complaint
Charts confirm that people paid for it. Whether they should have is a question for the reviews, and at the time of writing it sits on a Metacritic score of 85 with mostly positive notices.
Nearly every critic lands on the same objection: the combat gets repetitive.
Polygon’s Giovanni Colantoni described the game as “a battle worth surviving,” but only in stretches, singling out routine encounters, reused bosses and a progression loop that doesn’t reward the time you sink into it. “It feels like a great 12-hour game stretched to an exhausting 25-hour one. Piecemeal progression and recycled bosses go hand-in-hand with repetitive rift-closing missions and backtracks through previous levels to clear busy work sidequests,” Colantoni said.
Same criticism, opposite verdict
ScreenRant’s Chris Carter noted the very same recycled bosses and enemies, then waved the issue away. “Even with some of those shortcomings, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a triumph. There’s a lot to really dig into here if you’re a hardcore action fan, especially if you jack up the difficulty and let it rip,” Carter said.
IGN’s Will Borger, meanwhile, offered no qualifications whatsoever.
“There are moments in Onimusha: Way of the Sword where everything else fades. The controller falls away, the universe collapses, and the distance between you and Miyamoto Musashi is annihilated. There is nothing but move and counter move, sword clashing against sword, call and response. You will risk everything for another moment, another chance, and do it again and again until you claim victory or your chances are spent,” Borger said.